Did a US Hedge Fund Help Destroy Local Journalism? (editorandpublisher.com) 125
"What is lost when billionaires with no background nor interest in a civic mission, who are only concerned with profiteering, take over our most influential news organizations? What new models of news gathering, and dissemination show promise for our increasingly digital age? What can the public do to preserve and support vibrant journalism?"
That's a synopsis posted about the documentary Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink, cited by the long-standing news industry magazine Editor and Publisher (which dates back to 1901). This week its podcast interviewed filmmaker Rick Goldsmith about his 90-minute documentary, which they say "tells the tale" of how hedge fund Alden Global Capital clandestinely entered into the news publishing industry in a big way — and then "dismantled local newspapers 'piece by piece,' creating a crises within the communities they serve, leaving 'news deserts' and 'ghost papers' in their wake." [Goldsmith] spent more than 5-years creating his latest work... a film that tells the tale of how newspapers business model is faltering, not just because of the loss of advertising and digital disruption; but also to capitalist greed, as hedge funds and corporate America buy them, sell their assets and leave the communities they serve without their local "voice" and a final check on power.
On the podcast, Goldsmith notes that in many cases a paper's assets "were the newspaper buildings and the printing presses... These were worth in many cases more than the newspapers themselves." After laying off staff, the hedge fund could also downsize out of those buildings.
By 2021 Alden owned 100 newspapers and 200 more publications — and then acquired Tribune Publishing to become America's second-largest newspaper publisher.
The hedge fund currently owns several newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to SFGate: At first, Goldsmith's documentary might seem like it's delivering more bad news. But it avoids despair, offering hope on the horizon for news deserts where aggressive reporting is needed. It introduces the notion that the traditional capitalist business model is failing the news industry, and that nonprofit organizations must be providers of local coverage.
That's a synopsis posted about the documentary Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink, cited by the long-standing news industry magazine Editor and Publisher (which dates back to 1901). This week its podcast interviewed filmmaker Rick Goldsmith about his 90-minute documentary, which they say "tells the tale" of how hedge fund Alden Global Capital clandestinely entered into the news publishing industry in a big way — and then "dismantled local newspapers 'piece by piece,' creating a crises within the communities they serve, leaving 'news deserts' and 'ghost papers' in their wake." [Goldsmith] spent more than 5-years creating his latest work... a film that tells the tale of how newspapers business model is faltering, not just because of the loss of advertising and digital disruption; but also to capitalist greed, as hedge funds and corporate America buy them, sell their assets and leave the communities they serve without their local "voice" and a final check on power.
On the podcast, Goldsmith notes that in many cases a paper's assets "were the newspaper buildings and the printing presses... These were worth in many cases more than the newspapers themselves." After laying off staff, the hedge fund could also downsize out of those buildings.
By 2021 Alden owned 100 newspapers and 200 more publications — and then acquired Tribune Publishing to become America's second-largest newspaper publisher.
The hedge fund currently owns several newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to SFGate: At first, Goldsmith's documentary might seem like it's delivering more bad news. But it avoids despair, offering hope on the horizon for news deserts where aggressive reporting is needed. It introduces the notion that the traditional capitalist business model is failing the news industry, and that nonprofit organizations must be providers of local coverage.
Real culprit? (Score:2)
Re:Real culprit? (Score:4)
People stopped buying newspapers
True. I kept trying thru about 2016, but the local rag couldn't find anybody to deliver them. This is the result of moving away from afternoon delivery using kids after school hours to adults delivering papers in the early morning. The kids were happy to have walking around money. An adult's economic needs require them to take a route so large they struggle to provide quality service even using a car.
It's a shame really... I bought my VIC-20 by saving up 6 months worth of paper route earnings.
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I think eventually newspaper delivery will just be handled by package delivery, start the early shift of package delivery one or two hours earlier and they can deliver newspapers together with anything which fits through the mailslot. Problem solved.
Re: Real culprit? (Score:2)
It's true that people not buying the paper is a key driver behind the decline of newspapers, but it's primarily because fewer sales makes the paper a less attractive medium for advertisers. The purchase price of a newspaper often only pays for the physical manufacturing and delivery operations. Everything else - salaries, subscriptions to wire services, administration, etc. - is funded by advertising revenue.
Source: a newspaper publisher I once knew. ðY
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Another question: (Score:2)
bogeyman (Score:5, Insightful)
The capitalist is always the bogeyman.
The problem is that the newspaper business model collapsed when Craigslist came into being, soon followed by Google advertising.
Newspapers then realized they had to be online and give away their IP for free. Then they realized that wasn't a good business model either. That led to counting eyeballs to court advertising dollars, and counting eyeballs requires clickbait. To get clickbait, you don't need journalists. Propagandists are more useful. "Journalism" schools were happy to oblige.
Newspapers are not businesses (Score:1, Flamebait)
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Also, the effective rise of the public Internet from circa 1991 to 1995 also started to doom newspapers, because news could be sent out in effectively real time, not wait a day for a printed paper. This change really accelerated starting in 2007 with the rise of social media, especially the expansion of Facebook and Twitter.
Capitalism is kind of the problem here (Score:3)
Think about your argument, you're literally arguing that the critical job of informing the public deserved to be replaced with corporate propaganda [youtube.com] and adverts pretending to be news [youtube.com] because it couldn't function in capitalism.
Your mind is so focused on the free marke
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The capitalist is always the bogeyman.
The problem is that the newspaper business model collapsed when Craigslist came into being, soon followed by Google advertising.
Newspapers then realized they had to be online and give away their IP for free. Then they realized that wasn't a good business model either. That led to counting eyeballs to court advertising dollars, and counting eyeballs requires clickbait. To get clickbait, you don't need journalists. Propagandists are more useful. "Journalism" schools were happy to oblige.
What IP? They are supposed to report facts.
The truth is that the news organizations want to use other peoples IP for free while they lock it down. At the same time they want to dictate their opinion as fact. I'd call it gossip rather than news. Few care about facts anymore.
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Newspapers then realized they had to be online and give away their IP for free.
What IP?
IP like 146.75.81.111, the address of www.theguardian.com.
Who needs buildings and printing presses? (Score:2)
With WFH and as long as most of the readers are willing to switch to tabloid format, you don't really need any fixed assets to publish a paper.
Of course once the continuity is gone it will be almost impossible to start backup, they need to make the switch while selling off the assets. So the problem wasn't so much too much greed, but not enough. They went for the quick bucks and left the opportunity for crumbs on the table.
Too important to leave to capitalists (Score:3)
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No (Score:2)
Local journalism (hell journalism of any kind) was destroyed by the declining quality of the journalists themselves.
Journalists have only themselves to blame.
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That really does nothing to refute the basic premise that unfettered capitalism resulted in corporations buying up huge swaths of media and then not paying for good journalism anymore. The real problem seems to be n one is paying for good journalism anymore. I'm a firm believer that if you started paying journalists really well, and let them "off the leash" of extreme editorial oversight ("you can't write stories that make our corporate overlords look bad, or go against their interests"), you'd attract good
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Only sped up the inevitable (Score:1)
While companies like that are indeed slimeballs, it was probably inevitable that the papers would eventually fold, as the market for physical papers is shrinking. It's just far more economical to deliver news electronically, and the more it shrinks the greater the cost per paper.
Maybe if the local companies had folded slower (no pun intended), they'd have time to transition to web news, but that's hard to predict.
This is like asking if John... (Score:3)
Old news (Score:2)
"What is lost when billionaires with no background nor interest in a civic mission, who are only concerned with profiteering, take over our most influential news organizations? "
You complain only NOW?
William Randolph Hearst ....
Rupert Murdoch
Ted Turner
Jeff Bezos
Sumner Redstone
Silvio Berlusconi
Oprah Winfrey
Remember the Maine! (Score:2)
So now reporters are concerned? (Score:1)
Was there as much concern from reporters around the country as other industries were destroyed by financialization in the 90s? Seems like it took a decade or two for media to spend much time on the destruction of the rust belt and other manufacturing areas.
The only sad part is this hurts local media instead of the talking heads with nationwide exposure who parrot the part lines. I'd much rather get news on the local city council than the latest story on who paid Joe Biden through his crack smoking son.
Did a hedge fund destroy...? (Score:3)
Well... duh? Do locusts destroy crops?
Re: Journalists... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fox News and CNN are great examples of how profit motives aren't necessarily a benefit to society
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Indeed. Non-profits still have agendas to push.
Also, expecting a non-profit to take over a money-losing operation is silly. The money still has to come from somewhere.
Newspapers have disappeared because people can read news for free online, so they are unwilling to pay for subscriptions. Non-profits won't change that.
Re:Journalists... (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't read a piece by an actual Journalist in years. They're all propagandists these days.
What you are saying is simply disinformation propagated by people pushing ideological warfare. They want you to disbelieve everything. Once you start disbelieving everything, your opinions can not be changed by facts, because you no longer believe facts.
News has taken a hit (mostly from the fact that crappy but free news on the internet has driven out high quality but paid journalism) but here are still reliable news sources left. But the people pushing your ideological bias are telling you not to believe them
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Re:Journalists... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Multitude of news sources in the paywall era (Score:2)
So get your news from a multitude of sources [...] I regularly switch between NYT, US News, AP, NPR, CS Monitor, and a couple of others.
Getting news from a multitude of sources involves a multitude of recurring payments for subscriptions. News isn't like scripted entertainment, where you can binge one streaming provider for a month, cancel, and switch to the next.
Re:Journalists... (Score:5, Insightful)
You get what you pay for. If you’re reading free news, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. It was like that 20 years ago. Still his.
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The same NYT that pushed the falsified Steele Dossier ("Russian collusion") for months after it had been invalidated and hid the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the election - that NYT?
Laughable, sir. Laughable.
Re:Journalists... (Score:4, Informative)
You obviously lean conservative, so let me pick a right-leaning example. Fox and the National Review both latched onto the Trump 2020 election conspiracy crap. But, eventually, it became painfully obvious (to anyone not wearing a maga baseball cap) that the electrion was legit and the real reason Trump lost was because he’s an unrelenting, unapologetic, exhausting prick. The National Review admitted it’s mistake, retracted, and changed their coverage. It’s still a deeply-conservative publication, but they’ve acknowledged that 2020 was legit.
Whereas Fox news gave a sorta-kinda “men maybe Biden is the president” but their talk show hosts still flog that sh&t unapologetically.
In other words, if you lean right, the National Review is fairly trustworthy while Fox is not a good source of info. But you’re gonna have to pay a subscription to get access to the actual good stuff.
But if you demand perfection, you might as well never read anything ever again.
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The same NYT that pushed the falsified Steele Dossier ("Russian collusion") for months after it had been invalidated and hid the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the election - that NYT?
Laughable, sir. Laughable.
It hasn't been invalidated.
The piss tape is real.
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Weird. You should get with the Steele Dossier's author, Christopher Steele. He's not nowhere near that level of certainty.
Subscription news bubble (Score:2)
If I subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, that buys me zero page views on The New York Times or The Atlantic or The Washington Post. Should a reader be expected to subscribe annually to multiple news sites?
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Re:Journalists... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think the media is “hateful woke left” then you’re a bit biased yourself. Take this exchange for example. https://www.houstonchronicle.c... [houstonchronicle.com]
Ron DeSantis claims some states allow post birth abortions. The CNN journalist doesn’t even bother asking which states Ron is talking about. If the media was truly leftist wouldn’t they have taken this easy opportunity to make DeSantis look bad? Nope a wildly false claim is made and that’s the end.
Re: Journalists... (Score:1)
Perhaps they didnâ(TM)t because they know they wouldâ(TM)ve been reamed for misstating facts. Some fact checkers did and rate these claims as âpartly falseâ(TM) because although the procedure has been technically legalized in various states, practitioners must still follow both federal and ethical guidelines and the state does not collect statistics on the practice, hence it is hard to say whether it actually happens. But yes, by the letter of the law it could be argued to be legal.
Re: Journalists... (Score:4, Informative)
because although the procedure has been technically legalized in various states
There is no such thing as "post-birth abortion". That's just doublespeak for "murder"
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Well sure, but it is legalized in these states; it’s legal in various EU countries if you deliver a child with certain mental disabilities. Abortion is legal in some shape in most US states despite the ethical arguments that it is just murder.
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it’s legal in various EU countries if you deliver a child with certain mental disabilities
No there is no such thing for "mental disabilities", the laws in the only EU countries where this is legal demands that "In the light of prevailing medical opinion, the child’s suffering must be unbearable and with no prospect of improvement.", that is severely disconnected from any mental disability.
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your claim was about post birth abortions and that is illegal in Iceland, it's only legal in The Netherlands and in Belgium. Your Dutch might be broken (but I suspect more that you simply haven't looked at the actual laws and instead only listen to anti abortion propaganda), here is their site in English: https://www.government.nl/topi... [government.nl]
The law permits physicians to terminate the lives of newborn infants and to perform late-term abortion only on condition that they fulfil the following due care criteria:
In the light of prevailing medical opinion, the child’s suffering must be unbearable and with no prospect of improvement. This means that the decision to discontinue treatment is justified. There must be no doubt about the diagnosis and prognosis;
It's the first point of conditions that all have to be fulfilled in order for this to be lawful.
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Re: Journalists... (Score:2)
I think that really depends on how you define abortion. The fetus is viable for birth right around the time that the third trimester begins. There's a certain time period that's most optimal for birth that's right around 9 months, and if it goes longer than that you generally want to induce birth. Sometimes it's a good idea to induce much earlier. So after the fetus is viable for birth, what counts as an abortion? Simply killing it before it exits the womb? Or can it be after as well?
I'm an atheist, and I d
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If you think I think "the media is hateful woke left" then you cannot fucking read.
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No, the right wing nutjobs actually think being sensitive to the problems of various groups of people is bad.
Anti-woke is code for pro-hate.
Re: Journalists... (Score:2)
I really doubt that. Why else did the term "wokescold" come about? They're basically talking about the same thing.
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Yes, they like to complain about people who call them out for being bigots.
Re: Journalists... (Score:2)
Yes, Hugh Mungus was such a bigot. And the least biggoted person is obviously Rachel Dolezal. She's just pure victim, having been the victim of over 10 documented anti-black hate crimes. She's the only person who knows what it truly means to be woke.
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Oh no, it was a lot more than one. Do you even know why she accosted him to begin with? Basically her and her friends were pissed off that he was thanking the police for helping his daughter get off of her heroine addiction. They were all claiming to be there on behalf of black lives matter. One of them (not that lady) spoke up against him because, no fucking joke, his daughter might be "white". You can see it all here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And of course, her video began because she was pissed of
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Re: Journalists... (Score:2)
They weren't all women dude, and there were more than four. You were there my ass. You can't even keep your own story straight. Shit, just watch the video if you don't believe me.
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Re: Journalists... (Score:2)
Assuming this is all true (it's not, just watch the damn video) you realize that you're basically agreeing with the OP who said that people who use the term wokescold are being called out for their bigotry. In other words, these people, who are easily what you'd call wokescolds, were "calling out" Hugh Mungus were doing so because he's apparently a bigot according to them, and you're apparently in agreement with that assessment. That's literally the whole reason I brought him up.
Otherwise, why else did you
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Re:Journalists... (Score:4, Insightful)
My Keen insight (Score:1)
Turns out when
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The part of red states which are "more dangerous" are the Democratic run cities. If you look at the county level, you'll see the same thing, the counties with Democratic run cities are the worst in terms of violent crime and murder.
Um... no, it's the opposite of what you're saying (Score:1)
You need some new media sources. I recommend Beau Of The Fifth Column. That is, if you ever get tired of being lied to. But I gotta admit, it is nice to put your head in the sand, listen to some lies, and repeat them online for the lulz. It won't really make you happy, but the anger feels good doesn't it?
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Here are the facts [heritage.org]. Go argue with them.
You like the propaganda Mill (Score:1)
Seriously man if you can't be bothered to take this seriously then you're beyond hope. I hope 2025 finds you in a better place
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They just summarized the data. The original sources are County Health Rankings & Roadmap from the University of Wisconsin [countyhealthrankings.org] and MIT election labs [mit.edu], which you can verify yourself very easily because they cite their sources.
You brought up County data, well, bottom line:
Averaging across all counties that voted for Donald Trump yields an aggregate homicide rate of 4.06 per 100,000 people, while averaging across counties that voted for Joe Biden yields a homicide rate of 6.52 per 100,000 people.
[...]
Homicide rates in red counties, on the other hand, ranged from 3.90 per 100,000 people between 2002 and 2008 to 4.16 per 100,000 people between 2014 and 2020, while in blue counties these rates varied from 7.35 per 100,000 people between 2002 and 2008 to 6.76 per 100,000 people between 2014 and 2020.
If you have actual factual county information to contradict that (and not the discredited article the above responded to already), please present it. So far all you've done is made unsupported assertions which conflict with the known facts and
Re: Journalists... (Score:2)
If it was anything other than guns killing so many people in our country every year it would have long since been banned.
Just because some people are killed by an item doesn't mean it gets banned: have we banned automobiles? Knives? Cigarettes? Etc? No, of course not.
There are 300 million guns in America, how many gun deaths are there each year? I suspect at least one news network could refer to guns as 'mostly safe' [thehill.com].
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I think the answer to your question is something like "emotion = engagement".
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Bias [Re:Journalists...] (Score:2)
I asked this here recently: Why are there no news sources that report the FACTS and stop there?
There are hateful woke left-wing news sources and crazed right-wing news sources AND NOTHING IN THE MIDDLE, where facts, and facts alone, are allowed to tell the story.
Try looking for the ones in the middle. Here, for example: https://adfontesmedia.com/inte... [adfontesmedia.com]
Or here: https://www.allsides.com/media... [allsides.com]
Yet something more for Musk to fund?
Jeff Bezos tried that, and everybody criticizes him for "billionaires are buying the news!!"
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That chart is interesting, because it shows how much the Overton Window has shifted to the right.
In my opinion, that graphic would be correct if most of the news sources were shifted one column to the right.
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That chart is interesting, because it shows how much the Overton Window has shifted to the right. In my opinion, that graphic would be correct if most of the news sources were shifted one column to the right.
Interesting you say that, because of course the conservative position says the opposite, that the media all have a left-wing bias.
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They are victims of hateful wokeness, alas - Reuter's is DEI'ed to shit and the BBC refused to call Hamas terrorists.
DEI'd to shit [Re:Bias [Re:Journalists...]] (Score:2)
They are victims of hateful wokeness, alas - Reuter's is DEI'ed to shit and the BBC refused to call Hamas terrorists.
I don't know what the phrase "Reuter's is DEI'ed to shit" even means. Does "inclusion" mean that they report include new about black people and even Indians and Pakistanis just the same as news about white people?
and the BBC refused to call Hamas terrorists.
That's the Israeli stance, yes. Times of Israel actually had a pretty good discussion, heavily slanted toward the Israeli position, of course, but, to be fair, also including parts of the BBC response: https://www.timesofisrael.com/... [timesofisrael.com]
But the same article called the BBC a good impartial source of
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It's been in the news recently, so it's time to educate yourself.
Any organisation doing that is OBVIOUSLY not one to be trusted to report fairly on stories about discriminating against people because of their sex or the color of their skin.
> > and the BBC refused to call Hamas terrorists.
> That's the Israeli stance, yes
No, that is a FACT.
The British people trust the BBC because they don
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They are victims of hateful wokeness, alas - Reuter's is DEI'ed to shit
I don't know what the phrase "Reuter's is DEI'ed to shit" even means. Does "inclusion" mean that they report include new about black people and even Indians and Pakistanis just the same as news about white people?
DEI means actively discriminating against people while recruiting because of their sex or the color of their skin. It's been in the news recently, so it's time to educate yourself.
I still don't have any notion what you mean. We're not talking about their hiring policies, we're addressing your statement "there no news sources that report the FACTS." Has their reporting of FACTS has been "DEI'd to shit"?
(and, as an aside, I've discovered that pretty much always when people say that there's info available on the web but don't give a link, it means "this is a made-up fact I heard from an unreliable source, probably the Onion, but why don't you waste your time trying to track it down.)
> > and the BBC refused to call Hamas terrorists.
> That's the Israeli stance, yes
No, that is a FACT.
We
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In this case, Hamas TERRORISTS raped and murdered innocent Israeli civilians.
FACT. So who do you fucking think are IN FACT the bad guys ?
And in general, the BBC makes it very clear who it supports, including transexuals, manhaters, DEI in all its sexist, racist forms. The agenda of the demented woke, not a decent, independent agenda in any fucking way.
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You state that you are angry that the BBC doesn't echo your opinions back to you, but nothing you have said indicated that either Reuters or BBC fails to report facts.
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Re: DEI'd to shit [Re:Bias [Re:Journalists...]] (Score:2)
The BBC did indeed report that Hamas murdered and raped innocent Israelis. They continued to report this and remind us of this. They also always remind us that Hamas are designated as a terrorist organisation.
Israel has driven hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians from their homes, destroyed their cities, brought famine and killed more 23,000 innocent civilians and injured nearly 60,000, of whom the majority (maybe 70%) are women and children. Thereâ(TM)s a further 7,000 missing, possibly d
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DARVO gaslighting by greytree, who is an inbred, hateful crossburning KKK member. This is not surprising, it's just evidence that greytree ought to be given the Nuremberg sentence the same as all his fellow traveling terrorists up to and including the Hamas terrorists that antisemitic klan garbage greytree loves dearly.
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This is false. The "Palestinians" are one thing, Hamas is another. Hamas is a direct antisemitic, genocidal descendant organization of the "Free Arabian Legion," organized by Amin Al-Husseini in direct alliance with the Nazis during WW2.
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The details are a bit unclear, and witnesses said conflicting things. (Apparently the news sources you read don't mention that?) If there was not, in the initial reports, clear evidence that Alnaj was, in fact, responsible for Kessler's death, the BBC was correct in not that he was until they got more details. That's not bias-- that's the way newspapers work. Libel laws are much stricter in the UK than in the US, and accusing somebody of homicide when it's not absolutely c
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Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn - who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
We regularly point out that the British and other governments have condemned Hamas as a terrorist organisation, but that's their business. We also run interviews with guests and quote contributors who describe Hamas as terrorists.
The key point is that we don't say it in our voice. Our bu
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Re: DEI'd to shit [Re:Bias [Re:Journalists...]] (Score:2)
The response of somebody who lost. Youâ(TM)ve got nothing left, and certainly no facts, so you resort to insults and talking like a child. You destroy your own credibility.
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Why are there no news sources that report the FACTS and stop there?
You can read newsfeeds from news agencies Reuters/AP/AFP, they only report facts. In particular, AFP is bound by Statutes (enshrined in the Law of France) to remain factual and objective. From the Statutes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
1) "Agence France-Presse may under no circumstances take account of influences or considerations liable to compromise the exactitude or the objectivity of the information it provides; it may under no circumstances fall under the control, either de facto or de jure, of any
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Someone ask Musk to enforce it on Twitter ? ( which would still be a terrible place for news anyway, because of how it picks what to show you ).
Claims of media bias are overblown (Score:3, Informative)
By replacing objective journalism with partisan, yellow propaganda, this is how a company wins hearts, minds, and ultimately control of a nation.
Claims of ideological bias in the media may be overblown [theconversation.com]
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Re: Yes, weaponizing journalism is a major thing (Score:3)
The BBC's problem is, it tries *so* hard to espouse no editorial position at all, it ends up inadvertently legitimizing actual extremists in the name of "balance". A roundtable news episode between a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a Haredi Zionist isn't "balanced", it's a brawl worthy of Jerry Springer that might be entertaining, but isn't "news" or "journalism".
Journalism is not objective, nor should it be... as long as it's honest about its biases AND strives for at least factual honesty & corre
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